Knight Hawk Coal

Knight Hawk Coal Co. is a coal company in Percy, Illinois, that extracts and sell 3.6 million tons of coal annually from five coal mines in Illinois. In August 2006, Arch Coal acquired a 1/3 interest in Knight Hawk in exchange for cash and coal reserves.

Coal Mines

 * Creek Paum Mine
 * Hawkeye Mine
 * Prairie Eagle Surface Mine
 * Red Hawk Mine
 * Royal Falcon Mine

Coal Transport
Knight Hawk sends 200,000 tons of coal per year to its rail facility which sits along the Canadian National Railway/Illinois Central main line in Carbondale, Illinois. The facility includes a 20-car siding and train cars are loaded through a hopper that has a 500,00 tpy capacity.

Proposed Coal Mines
Knight Hawk is pursuing a 160-acre strip of land to expand coal mining near Pyramid State Park, Illinois' biggest state park. During their spring session 2011, Illinois lawmakers signed off on a plan for the state to lease the strip at the edge of Pyramid State Park to Knight Hawk, who hope to use the land as a staging ground for a 240-acre strip mine just outside the 20,000-acre park, if a deal can be worked out with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. The company also would carve for coal underneath the public area. The measure was delivered in June 2011 to Gov. Pat Quinn, who must make the final decision on the bill.

Illinois does not allow mining or logging in its state parks, and allowing it in Pyramid State Park — much of it former mining land that has been reclaimed — would be a first, state Department of Natural Resources spokeswoman Januari Smith said, who added that the agency had taken "a neutral position" on the legislation.

Under the plan, Knight Hawk would lease at fair market value a small portion of the park — which draws about 400,000 visitors annually — for a decade to adhere to a federal law requiring that coal not be mined within 300 feet of park land. As part of the venture near Pinckneyville, a 5,500-resident town about 70 miles southeast of St. Louis, most of the mining actually would take place off park land, in 240 acres of private land now home to maturing wheat.

Using a giant mechanical extractor, the mining company would also bore up to 1,000 feet into the walls of the pit next to the park to get at additional coal. Knight Hawk estimates extracting 500,000 tons of coal a year from the site for roughly seven or eight years.

Related SourceWatch articles
To see a listing of coal mines in a particular state, click on the map:
 * Coal and jobs in the United States
 * Coal phase-out
 * Headquarters of U.S. coal mining companies
 * Global list of coal mining companies and agencies
 * Illinois and coal
 * Proposed coal mines

